0-0-0-0-0
"Come on, Al. Just this one favor."
"No! Absolutely not!" Alphys crossed her arms, readjusting her glasses. She was bent over her 'project' studiously, inspecting the motionless pupils of Asriel's eyes with a small handheld flashlight and taking notes. "It's a disaster waiting to happen; I can't believe that you even keep that thing in your house! And you wanted me to work on it first, because...?"
"Funny," Sans leaned against the metal counter top, ignoring her question. "I could say the same about your project."
"My project is less likely to result in the end of the universe," she rolled her eyes, ticking something off her list and scribbling down a memo. "Pass me that?"
Sans eyed the smoking purple beaker that she pointed at with her pencil, studying it dubiously.
"... Before the body turns to dust, preferably?" Alphys said with a hint of impatience.
"Beats me how you managed to replicate him so well," he shrugged, watching as she poured the entire contents down the body's open mouth. Her 'project' shuddered and convulsed for a moment, a horrible imitation of life shaking for a spare few seconds. Sans tried not to look away, feeling uncomfortable around the thing.
"As I usually do with my work," she said quietly. "A bit of science, a bit of magic."
"I guess you could say it took a lot of DET-"
"Don't even make the joke," she held up a hand.
"So," he said conversationally, pulling his jacket a little tighter to fend off an odd shiver. "I'm guessing you gathered DNA from Asgore and Toriel and jammed them together?"
"Perfect genetic replication is hardly so simple as 'jamming it together' Sans!" Alphys frowned. "But, essentially, yes. I duplicated the prince to the best of my capabilities. Before... you know. That. If I can just take care of the rest of the problem..."
"Which would be...?" Sans rolled his hand, never taking his eyesockets off her.
Alphys covered the body with a thick white sheet, pulling it completely up until nothing but an odd lump was left on the operation table. She pulled at her hands compulsively, chewing her bottom lip.
"There's a problem." he guessed, and she said nothing. "One you don't wanna talk about."
"I-I can keep Flowey- I mean, Asriel's body, um, in stasis..." she began uneasily. "So long as I continue injecting it with the formula periodically, it's safer than cryostasis... but..."
She rubbed her eyes under her square glasses tiredly, and Sans felt a sudden pang of empathy for her.
"But every new injection makes his body more unstable," he mused aloud.
"I don't know how much longer it's going to last!" Alphys paced back and forth, cleaning her glasses with the edge of her lab coat. "There has to be a method of transferring the consciousness from the current host body to the new host; I know it can be done, I just have to find out how to reverse the effects without..."
"Without destroying either the host or the consciousness," Sans finished for her. He held a hand over his mouth, thinking.
"I'm at my wit's end, Sans," she rubbed her eyes again tiredly. "I keep telling him 'just one more day', again and again, like-like maybe if I just keep giving him hope that I'll stumble across the answer, and it's just...!"
She mimed shaking something in midair, and he nodded once.
"You know?" she finished in exasperation.
"I know."
"There might be a way."
Alphys was in the middle of cleaning her glasses again and froze.
"Maybe if we tried-"
"No!" she barked, causing him to jump. "No, no no! Not that, not again; not ever, ever again!"
"Jeez, just hear me out, Alphys..." Sans struggled to remain upright.
"Absolutely not!" she stamped her foot. "The last vial of extracted DETERMINATION-"
"Might be exactly what we need to efficiently transfer Flowey's consciousness into the new host," Sans urged her, but she only shook her head furiously.
"No, no. Not after the last fiasco. I-I could never, ever live with myself if I allowed a sludge puddle with his mind trapped inside it to live a life like that, barely on the edge of death. This time," she said, pushing her glasses up with one talon. "This time it's going to be different. This time, we don't have to rely on Doctor Gaster's work. This time I'm going to ensure that everything goes accordingly to plan."
"But what about any of this is better than what Gaster could do if we had him here? What makes this time any different?"
"This time... nobody dies."
Sans watched her miniature tirade, more stunned than anything. At first, he wasn't certain what to feel. He felt a little numb. He felt a little cold. He felt a little hungry. But as they ascended the basement and the warm lights of the evening greeted him, Sans let out a quiet chuckle. Humorless laughter was something that was both fragile and disturbing. So long as even a single person can laugh, over eve the silliest of things, then it was all worth the effort. So Sans laughed. He stood across from her unperturbed waiting for the cool wafting moment of truth. He just had to keep retelling himself that. Had to hope against hope that this project wouldn't wind up like the other failed projects that got 'decommissioned' and salvaged.
"I'm sorry, Sans. I-I can't leave it for long enough to-"
"I'll be in the lounge," Sans said aloud, no longer paying attention to where she was even at. He had already half teleported out of the basement and within a spare few seconds he was raiding liquor cabinets back home to his delight. A few bottles here and there lined neatly and primly according to color and release date. Sans telikinetically popped a crystal decanter and began calmly pouring himself a drink amidst the floating glass.
It would appear that he was going to be on his own. Then again, that's how it usually was.
0-0-0-0-0
How it almost always was in dreams of this caliber.
Alone.
He stalked down the frigid empty streets of Snowdin, snow piled up around buildings and streets covered in thin sheets of ice. Sans felt a trickle of snow seep into his slippers as he trudged, the only noise the cruel howling of the wind as he slowly but surely trundled through the waves of snow. Gravity and weather conspired against him, but he carried on regardless, fingers feeling numb in his pockets. He could still hear her last words ringing in his head, like she had just said them moments ago and not after days and days of solitary silence. Sans pushed on the boarded up window of a small shop out of curiosity, and the wood crumbled almost instantly. He dared a peek inside and caught a dark flash of hair before the wooden slot was roughly jammed back into place.
Sans released a quiet sigh through his newly acquired red attire, letting it wrap around his neck a couple of times. He stuffed his hands back in his pockets, continuing his search for something, anything that might have been able to help. At this point resources were running thin. Even if just the tavern keeper could pool together for a few minutes to share information it might not have been a wasted trip. Nothing he did would undo what the child had done to the other monsters.
Sans's grip on Papyrus's scarf grew tighter.
Nothing he did would undo what the child had done to Papyrus.
He wished that he could tell him now how much he missed him, that sobbing into his dusty scarf wasn't delaying the inevitable. Tell him that it was all going to be okay. Somehow, someway they were all going to make it out.
And to have that all ripped away from him again and again...
"You know how it ends."
Sans stood, no longer in Snowdin. The tiled hallway floors seemed to shift around beneath him, tilting uncomfortably. Within moments it was difficult to decipher whether or not he was on the floor or ceiling. Sans looked up to see the standing visage of Frisk, dangling from invisible wires with an upside down smile. Behind her, beckoning, was the ephemeral black mass whirling around and between them, occasionally leaving imprints of a ghostly white, cracked face. The creeping tendrils of shadow emanating from the spectral image of a twisted Ghaster reached out for him, scraping by his face with a noise like dragged nails over a chalkboard.
"You know how it ends!" the familiar voice screamed at him from behind the wall, from just beneath the creaking upwards floorboards. A multitude of voices, varying from aged to youthful pleading the same thing. Accusing. "You know how it ends. You know how it ends. You know how it ends."
Sans could almost feel the finger bones scraping the bending wood around him, suffocating him in the twisted hallways that went on forever and ever and-
Sans froze in place, along with several of his floating tools.
A couple of loud clangs resounded as the remnants of his floating laboratory dropped to the ground. Sans sighed as he surveyed the wreckage. Sooner or later this nightmares of his were going to cause him to accidentally cave in the ceiling. Literal piles of tools had clumped together in midair, and he watched in mild dismay as the remainders floating in midair began to fall, noisily clanging against the floor. He silently berated himself, half glad that at least the generator hadn't been damaged this time.
The empty liquor bottle rolled against his foot, and he stretched, aching as he realized he'd fallen asleep sitting on the stool in his lab yet again. His back moaned in protest, but he forced himself to stretch until the ache in his bones began to ease from the awkward position that he'd drifted off in. The remnants of the dream flashed in his eyes and he rubbed them with one hand, struggling to remember what it was that had bothered him so much. He reached for the scarf around his neck, only to vaguely remember that it had only been part of the distant dream as well. Sans paused for a long moment, a sinking feeling deep in his stomach.
"How long was I out?" he grumbled to himself and rubbed his scalp. Sans sorely wished for a wristwatch, as there was no clock or other method of telling time in the basement. He trundled up the stairs after a minute more of stretching, his mind feeling oddly numb. Checking the grandfather clock in the living room, he discovered that it was a little past noon; and oddly enough, nobody answered when he called out to them. Papyrus wasn't in his room, Frisk didn't come running when he called, Toriel was nowhere to be seen. An uneasy feeling began to tickle the back of his neck. At long last he found a clue as to where they might have gone in the small, almost unnoticed note that had been left on the kitchen table, written in Toriel's tiny, pristine handwriting.
Papyrus, Frisk and I shall be attending her school function. Saved you a little something special. Enjoy!
Sans blinked, reading over the note a couple of times before checking the fridge.
Inside was a single slice of pie, complete with a little dollop of whipped topping. He grinned, slowly shaking his head.
There wasn't time to snack. There was hardly time to sleep.
The machine was waiting.
0-0-0-0-0
"Al. Yeah. It's me," Papyrus said in a hushed tone, one gloved hand covering the receiver of the phone. "Are you sure? No. Of course. Don't worry. I'm glad you finally told me; I'll be there soon."
"Something the matter?" Toriel hummed as Papyrus pocketed his cellphone. She hardly took her eyes off the group of children chatting amicably around the table, the bunched up adults discussing their own issues not far away.
"It's Sans," Papyrus said after a moment of discomfort. "I think he's trying something... dangerous."
Toriel tore her eyes away completely, focusing entirely on him.
"What do you mean?"
"I'm not entirely sure. Alphys sounded pretty upset about whatever it is he's doing, so it must be something big. I'm heading back to the house to check on him-"
"I'm right behind you," Toriel said without a moment's hesitation. "Just give me a moment and Frisk and I will join you."
She strode off toward the group of children, where Frisk sat in the middle giving a detailed description of the underground to a handful of listening kids. Papyrus held a hand over his mouth, thinking.
"A moment might be more than we have..." he mused quietly. "Oh, Sans. What have you gotten up to this time?"
It was barely a second later that the ground shook terribly. Then, the power went out.
Papyrus began to get a sinking feeling that he knew why.
0-0-0-0-0